


Never Die

by mautadite



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Episode Tag, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 19:09:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5597521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mautadite/pseuds/mautadite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jet plunged his hands into the ashes. Still warm. Very warm. A few hours earlier and they would have seen this house as it was dying in the flames.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Die

Jet plunged his hands into the ashes. Still warm. Very warm. A few hours earlier and they would have seen this house as it was dying in the flames. 

The earth was scorched for miles around them. Jet got to his feet, skimming the horizon and the tops of the trees in the distance, but no foreign shadows or outlines were to be seen. Even the sparrowkeets and hogmonkeys had abandoned this place, after smelling the death and the flames. He, Smellerbee and Longshot were the only living things here.

He kicked ash and rubble aside, clearing a path to move further into the burnt-out shell of a house. Quiet footsteps behind him told him that Longshot followed in his wake. Jet wondered who were the people who had once called this place home. Where they were now. How they had died. It was pointless to think about; this was a war, and nameless, faceless deaths were a copper piece a dozen. Jet thought about it anyway as his foot brushed against the outline of a grey toy sword. It collapsed into dust.

He felt Longshot’s sleeve brush against his own, and turned to face him. His friend’s eyes were quiet. Jet’s teeth clamped down hard on the stalk in his mouth, and he felt the bitter juice squeeze its way out to flood the corners of his mouth.

“Yeah, and?” he replied, snapping without really meaning to. “That doesn’t change the fact that if we’d been here a few hours ago, these people wouldn’t have been the only ones lying in the dirt, a few days away from becoming food for worms or dust on the wind. We could’ve _done_ someth—”

Longshot shook his head, his eyes dark and calm.

“I don’t _want_ to save everyone,” Jet retorted before he thought, and the sour bile in his throat told him that it was true. The hard, black truth. He didn’t really have that big of a saviour complex. He’d already proven to himself, and to everyone else, that he cared about dead firebenders more than he cared about most things. More than helping people? More than justice? More than freedom?

After Katara and the others had left him frozen to that tree, he’d had a lot of time to think. The boy who’d started out in the ashes of his town and his parents… this wasn’t the person he’d planned on becoming. And Jet wasn’t going to let this go any further. He glanced at Longshot, who was both concerned and inquisitive. Jet made a lot of promises that he eventually broke, but he didn’t want this to be one of them. What remained of his Freedom Fighters was counting on him. Bee and Long… they looked at him like he was the forge, and they the hammers.

He wouldn’t try to take back what he’d said. But he _was_ going to keep on trying to change.

Longshot was saying something, but was interrupted as Smellerbee kicked her way through the house behind them, coming to tell them what Jet already knew. Ash had smudged the red paint on her cheeks, and she was shaking her head.

“Nothing.” She bit her lip briefly. “If anyone survived this, they were taken prisoner, or they trekked off on their own.”

Jet nodded.

“Figured as much. I guess the raiding parties’ orders have changed in the past years. Not as much ‘kill on sight’, a little more ‘capture and enslave’.”

He didn’t mean to sound bitter; he did anyway. Smellerbee paused, and then reached over and touched the back of his hand lightly. Like a commiserating gesture; he saw it in her eyes when he turned to look at her. She kept doing things like that these days. It both amused and pleased him. He reached out and ruffled her hair a little, and Longshot was smiling a bit too.

“We should get going,” Smellerbee said. “If we make good time, we might catch the first ferry that leaves tomorrow afternoon.”

Jet nodded slowly, and he could hear Smellerbee falter, a small sound in her throat.

“Unless you wanna…” She scratched her head, and looked at Longshot for help. “…Yeah, unless you wanna stay and… do something for them?”

Jet looked at what stretched out before him; a ruined shell of a home, choked with ash and melting smoke. He couldn’t think of what the inhabitants had looked like, and now that they were beyond his help, maybe that was for the best. He tried to think of words like ‘starting over’ and ‘going straight’; tried to imagine them sticking. With Longshot and Smellerbee behind him, steadfast and stalwart, it didn’t seem impossible. 

He shook his head, taking the broken stalk out of his mouth and letting it fall to the hard, blackened floor.

“No. Let’s go. There’s nothing to bury here.”


End file.
